Loading/Downloading image from URL on Swift

Question

I\'d like to load an image from a URL in my application, so I first tried with Objective-C and it worked, however, with Swift, I\'ve a compilation error:

Answer 1

(Swift 4 update) To answer the original question directly, here's the swift equivalent of the posted Objective-C snippet.

let url = URL(string: image.url)
let data = try? Data(contentsOf: url!) //make sure your image in this url does exist, otherwise unwrap in a if let check / try-catch
imageView.image = UIImage(data: data!)

---

DISCLAIMER:

It's important to note that the Data(contentsOf:) method will download the contents of the url synchronously in the same thread the code is being executed, so do not invoke this in the main thread of your application.

An easy way to make the same code run asynchronously, not blocking the UI, is by using GCD:

let url = URL(string: image.url)

DispatchQueue.global().async {
    let data = try? Data(contentsOf: url!) //make sure your image in this url does exist, otherwise unwrap in a if let check / try-catch
    DispatchQueue.main.async {
        imageView.image = UIImage(data: data!)
    }
}

That said, in real life applications, if you want to have the best User Experience and avoid multiple downloads of the same image, you may want to also have them not only downloaded, but cached. There's already quite a few libraries that does that very seamless and they are all really easy to use. I personally recommend Kingfisher:

import Kingfisher

let url = URL(string: "url_of_your_image")
// this downloads the image asynchronously if it's not cached yet
imageView.kf.setImage(with: url) 

And that's it